121
Leadership & Organisation
11 min read
Leadership Presence: Intervene Without Becoming the Gate
Use leadership attention to restore missing context, authority, protection, or coordination, then return ownership before presence becomes a gate.
The journal
Product notes for people who build.
Practical essays on product strategy, discovery, development, technology, and the work of turning ideas into useful products.
120
Design & Delivery
11 min read
Design Handoffs: Build a Shared Verification System
Turn design handoff into a versioned build contract: map authoritative decisions, expose unknowns, test behaviour, and review implementation deltas.
119
Product Strategy
11 min read
Product Planning: Commit Without False Certainty
A practical product planning system for balancing outcomes, capacity, dependencies, evidence, and commitments while making every change explicit.
118
Design & Delivery
10 min read
Lean Operations from Day One: Build the Minimum Operating Baseline
Define the smallest operating baseline that lets an early-stage team change, observe, support, and recover a live product without heroics.
117
Product Strategy
13 min read
Platform Strategy: Prove One Valuable Interdependence
Turn a platform ambition into a bounded bet about participants, shared capabilities, incentives, governance, evidence, and exit conditions.
116
Leadership & Organisation
11 min read
Product Org Design: Build the Decision System, Not the Chart
Design product ownership around recurring decisions, coupled work, explicit dependencies, and the authority teams need before drawing reporting lines.
115
Design & Delivery
11 min read
Experience Mapping: Expose the System Behind the Outcome
Map how actors, channels, backstage work, rules, and handoffs produce an outcome, then turn responsibility gaps into research and change decisions.
114
Product Strategy
13 min read
The Strategic Power of Business Model Design
Connect actors, product behaviour, pricing, channels, and cost to serve to find where a business model supports or undermines value.
113
Design & Delivery
11 min read
Micro-Interactions: Design the State Change
Design micro-interactions as honest state transitions with clear feedback, accessible status, safe recovery, and performance that survives real conditions.
112
AI & Technical Product
12 min read
Understanding Data Platforms for Non-Technical PMs
Turn a product promise into clear data requirements across collection, contracts, quality, freshness, ownership, privacy, serving, and failure recovery.
111
Discovery & Validation
13 min read
Qualitative Product Research: Make Claims the Evidence Can Carry
Turn qualitative product research into bounded, challengeable claims by tracing decisions through sampling, analysis, counterevidence, and limits.
110
AI & Technical Product
10 min read
ML Deployment: The Product Manager's Release Contract
Define the workflow, data, serving, monitoring, and recovery conditions an ML system must satisfy before users depend on its predictions.
109
Product Strategy
11 min read
Go-to-Market Strategy: Design the Path to Adoption
Build a coherent go-to-market system across segment, promise, route, adoption, commercial model, operating readiness, and evidence—not a launch-day checklist.
108
Product Strategy
12 min read
Strategic Roadmapping: Govern the Bets Between Teams
Build a strategic roadmap for coupled product bets: expose shared capability, dependencies, commitment states, decision rights, and change consequences.
107
Design & Delivery
12 min read
Sprint Execution: Protect the Goal, Manage the Flow
Run a sprint as a goal-protection and flow system: negotiate scope, expose ageing work, handle interruptions, preserve quality, and inspect outcomes.
106
Design & Delivery
11 min read
Agile Estimation: Name the Decision Before You Estimate
Choose decomposition, reference-class forecasting, or a bounded investigation by the decision an estimate must support and the uncertainty it can reduce.
105
Design & Delivery
11 min read
Design Tokens as a Versioned Product Interface
Build design tokens as a governed contract: model roles and contexts, generate platform outputs, protect compatibility, and expose adoption exceptions.
104
Product Strategy
12 min read
Fundraising Strategy: Decide What Capital Must Buy
Decide whether to raise, connect capital to decision-relevant milestones, model runway honestly, and examine dilution and governance before accepting terms.
103
Design & Delivery
10 min read
How I Shipped Chroni with OpenSaaS—and Where AI Hurt
A product manager's account of building an emergency-preparedness SaaS: stack choices, specification work, content modelling, AI debt, and deployment.
102
Product Strategy
11 min read
Market Segmentation: Build Groups That Change the Strategy
Build market segments around meaningful differences, test whether they are identifiable and useful, then translate them into product and go-to-market choices.
101
Design & Delivery
11 min read
Backlog Refinement: Govern Uncertainty Before Commitment
Refine product backlog items by exposing the uncertainty that matters, choosing the next evidence, and preserving what the team still does not know.
100
Leadership & Organisation
10 min read
Constructive Feedback: Design the Next Observable Move
Give feedback that names the evidence, protects task focus, invites missing context, and ends with a change both people can observe and review.
099
Leadership & Organisation
10 min read
Retrospective Formats: Choose a Lens, Then Close the Loop
Choose a retrospective format from the question the team must answer, then turn evidence into one owned change with a review condition.
098
Product Strategy
10 min read
Strategic Bets: Commit in Stages Without Hiding the Risk
Turn an uncertain strategic move into staged commitments with a causal thesis, bounded exposure, evidence checkpoints, and explicit stop or scale decisions.